Money and Relationship II: Society

Politics and society are lightly set in opposition to each other with society understood as the totality of all of its citizens as citizens, namely insofar as they are not involved in politics, and not with the steering and management of themselves as the citizenry. A money-mediated society however is no longer just the community of its members beyond such mediation. The mediation through money puts each individual in abstract connection with a totality that is not tangible as such: the totality of money as a totality of the owners of money. Society is not community, rather – in all reality, as abstract as that sounds – a system of mediations.

The life of each person is dependent on getting money

The money-mediated society abets the connection between its members through mutual dependence that is very real but highly abstract in form: dependence on money. The life of each is dependent on getting money – on that he consequently does or produces something for which others give him money. And he is also inversely dependent on what the others do and produce that he needs to live and for which he therefore needs money so he can buy from them. But he doesn’t know those for whom he does something, or he doesn’t do it for them because he knows them. And they also do theirs for him not because they know him and want to contribute to his livelihood; rather, as must he, they themselves must look to come to money. In the pursuit of this money-formed interest each for himself in isolation, a relationship among the isolated arises – among those who are isolated by and in this very relationship.

People must pay for everything and – above all – also be able to pay

But it doesn't just separate, it brings them into opposing positions. Testifying to the countless conflicts when all the individual interests of the isolated compete with those of all the others are the countless highly paid lawyers who contend these conflicts. However diverse the conflicts may be, they have at their core the principle of exclusion, which is established with our money. Because this money requires that with it something is to buy that only the one who buys it gets. All others are excluded from that which is to be purchased. They are excluded from it, so that it goes solely against money to the person who raised the money for it. In a society where people virtually everything they need can have only with money, they are therefore first of all excluded from virtually everything: they must pay for it and – above all – also be able to pay. Those who cannot can starve.